Dan Brown

Daniel James Brown (Exeter, New Hampshire, United States, June 22, 1964), known as Dan Brown, is an American writer who is especially popular for his novel The Da Vinci Code (2003) and other titles featuring the character Robert Langdon.

Biography

Son of a mathematician and a composer of sacred music. He studied high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, Class of 1982, and his undergraduate studies at Amherst College. As a student he lived in Gijón (Spain) in the year 1980, this transfer to Spain was his first trip abroad studying at an institute in that city. Brown affirms that in 1985, a year before graduating, he studied Art History at the University of Seville, but this university declared that there are no records of him having been a student at its facilities, and that if he had been, it is likely that did it as an itinerant student in a simple summer course. A graduate of Amherst College, he devoted himself to music: he produced a recording of children's songs and founded the Dalliance company, with which he recorded Perspective . His brother Gregory W. Brown also studied high school at Phillips Exeter Academy and studied music and composition at Amherst College, like Dan.

In 1991, he moved to Hollywood, California, to continue his career as a pianist and singer-songwriter, while earning a living as an English and Spanish teacher at a Beverly Hills college. At the National Academy of Composers he met Blythe Newlon, a woman fifteen years older, whom he married in 1997 after living together for several years.

They returned to New Hampshire, where he continued his musical career and taught English at Phillips Exeter Academy and Spanish at Lincoln Akerman School. In 1993, in addition, she recorded Dan Brown and in 1994 Angels and demons , a title that she would keep for her second novel.

But everything changed in the summer of 1993. While on a beach in Tahiti, he found the novel The Doomsday Conspiracy (1991) by Sidney Sheldon forgotten on a deck chair. Returning to Exeter, she began work on Digital Fortress , her first novel, in which she implicated the Intelligence Agency in the plot. National Security (NSA). This techno-thriller, released in 1998, criticized for its superficiality and slips in technological treatment, had a relative commercial success.

In the year 2000 he published Angels and Demons, where the character Robert Langdon appears for the first time, a professor of religious symbology at Harvard University who, investigating a mysterious symbol, meets the sect of the Illuminati, a brotherhood that has been facing the Catholic Church for centuries.

The following year Deception Point (2001, translated into Spanish as The Conspiracy) appears, a book that motorizes its plot with the discovery of a strange object in the Arctic by part of a satellite (SOT) of NASA.

Langdon, the key character of Angels & Demons, is also the protagonist of the work that made him a worldwide best-selling phenomenon, The Da Vinci Code, a book focused on the search for the real meaning of the Holy Grail.

Works

Independent novels

• The digital fortress (Digital Fortress1998, ed. Umbriel)
• The conspiracy (Deception Point2001, ed. Umbriel)

Robert Langdon Series

1. Angels and Devils (Angels & Demons, 2000, ed. Umbriel. Adapted to the cinema in 2009.
2. The code Da Vinci (The Da Vinci Code, 2003, ed. Umbriel. Adapted to the cinema in 2006.
3. The lost symbol (The Lost Symbol, 2009, ed. Planet) Adapted to TV series in 2021.
4. Inferno (Inferno, 2013, ed. Planet). Adapted to the cinema in 2016.
5. Origin (Origin, 2017, ed. Planet)

Humor works

• 187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman (1995, co-written under the pseudonym of Danielle Brown, without translation into Spanish)
• The Bald Book (1998, co-written together with his wife, without translation into Spanish)

Children's works

• The symphony of animals (Wild Symphony, 2020, ed. Planet), children's book illustrated

Plot of his works

Independent novels

The digital fortress

Her first novel stars Susan Fletcher, one of the NSA's best cryptographers, whose life will be in danger with the arrival of a strange code that, at first glance, she herself cannot decipher. At the same time and unknown to Susan, her fiancé, the translator David Becker, is sent by the NSA to Seville in search of the key to solving the mystery, while he is closely followed by a relentless hitman.

The Conspiracy

His third novel revolves around a network of conspiracies that is unleashed after the discovery, by NASA, of a meteorite buried in the Milne ice shelf (Canada, near the North Pole) that seems to present irrefutable evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life. The protagonist of it is the intelligence analyst Rachel Sexton.

The Robert Langdon Saga

Angels and Demons

His second novel is, in turn, the first in a series of adventures starring Harvard professor of symbology and religious art, Robert Langdon. In this case, Professor Langdon and CERN scientist Vittoria Vetra will be involved in a race against time to save the Vatican from a terrorist attack organized by a secret brotherhood believed to have disappeared, the Illuminati, involving an antimatter bomb. and the kidnapping of four preferiti cardinals in full papal conclave.

The Da Vinci Code

In his fourth novel, his most popular, and possibly the most controversial of all, Brown returns to the character of Robert Langdon, who must now solve a mystery with cryptologist Sophie Neveu, related to a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, of which Leonardo da Vinci would have been Grand Master, and the possible location of the Holy Grail. Langdon and Sophie set out in search of the Grail through various locations in Paris and London, while a murderous albino monk allegedly works under Opus Dei to keep the secret hidden.

The lost symbol

In his fifth novel, he deals with the subject of Freemasonry with the character of Robert Langdon as the protagonist. This time, he must save the life of an old friend, Peter Solomon, and prevent a closely guarded secret from falling into the wrong hands, with the help of Institute of Noetic Sciences scientist Katherine Solomon, Peter's sister.

It was published on September 15, 2009 in the United States and on October 29, 2009 in Spain.

Hell

This is his sixth novel and the fourth starring symbology expert Robert Langdon. In this novel, Langdon wakes up in a Florence hospital with a gunshot wound to the head and unable to remember anything that happened, so he finds himself immersed, along with the mysterious Sienna Brooks, in a police chase as they try to decipher the code. plan of a demented transhumanist scientist obsessed with Dante Alighieri and world overpopulation.

Origin

Fifth installment of the Robert Langdon series. Professor Langdon goes to the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum to find out a great secret that Edmond Kirsch, one of Langdon's brightest students years ago, must reveal and that will be transcendental for humanity. At that moment, chaos breaks out and the protagonist must flee to Barcelona to find and decipher the clues that give access to the great secret that would answer the two questions that humanity has always asked: Where do we come from? and where do we go?. Origen is developed entirely in Spain. Barcelona, Bilbao, Madrid and Seville (the city where an important part of The Digital Fortress was set) are the main settings. It was published in October 2017.

Movie adaptations

Three of the five novels in the series featuring Robert Langdon's character have been adapted for film, all by American director Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks:

1. The code Da Vinci (The Da Vinci Code2006). Directed by Ron Howard, starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, and with the secondary interpretations of Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Paul Bettany and Jean Reno.
2. Angels and Devils (Angels & Demons2009). Directed by Ron Howard, starring Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer, and with the secondary interpretations of Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgård and Pierfrancesco Favino.
3. Inferno (Inferno, 2016). Directed by Ron Howard, starring Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones, and with the secondary interpretations of Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy and Ben Foster.